The Watch
by Georgina B
Summary: Amid the bleakness of North Korea's kwanliso, a little boy meets his destiny in the form of a glass-faced watch.
I'll eat my hat if anybody actually reads this, but I don't much like the taste of hat, anyway. I'm just proud to have FINALLY finished a fic for this fandom, even if it can barely be called a drabble, since I always hesitate to say I'm a real fan of anything until there's fic for it on my FF account.

Heroes are good and heroes are fine, but give me a solid gold villain and I'll follow you to the ends of the earth. I could write an honors thesis on why I love Colonel Glass so much. I mean, real life fear of an actual totalitarian nation with nuclear weapons and an army of brainwashed citizens + creative superpower used in creative ways + slasher smile of the GODS = SLAAAAY. Literally. Slay. Because he kills people. Is this thing on?

ANYWAY this is a Glass origin story because we never got one and I needed some babyGlass in my life. The name is my own invention, of course. Given that he talks a fair bit about how Americans don't know what it's like to suffer, I figured he might've come from someplace like where I've put him. I'd love to expand on this, but for now at least, it's...what it is.

 **xxx**

Jaeyong had no memory of life before the kwanliso. He had been three years old when Appa got caught speaking evil words to a neighbor. His little sister Yiha had been born in the camp.

Now Jaeyong was six, and he spent his days sitting on a stool in a small building with mud walls, shucking corn. Yiha was too young to work, so she hung around him most of the time, usually asking for food.

As he sat there each day, peeling the husks off of corn cobs until his fingers were numb, he wished he could have been born in a different skin, to a good loyal appa instead of a traitorous snake. He wished his appa was the Great Leader, whose smile in his portraits was the only one you were likely to see in the kwanliso. If his appa was the Great Leader, he'd never go hungry again.

One day as a guard strode by, his club swinging from his hand, something on his wrist caught Jaeyong's eye. It was a watch. It wasn't an especially nice watch, but its glass face flashed in the light like a winking eye, and then and there Jaeyong knew he had to have it. The need echoed in the hollowness inside him, almost making him tremble.

When the guard passed close to him, his hand dangling only a foot from Jaeyong's face, Jaeyong reached out...then snatched his hand back. What was he thinking? The moment he felt a tug on his wrist, the guard would look down and see him, and he would be beaten to death for stealing.

The boy on the stool beside him was lagging, staring at nothing with sleepy eyes as his fingers fumbled with the corn. The guard stopped and began to berate him. While his attention was on the other boy, Jaeyong reached out again, his fingertips hovering within a few inches of the watch. This time, without his even having to touch it, the watch crept down the guard's wrist like something alive. It was slightly too big for him – maybe it had been his appa's watch – so it slid over his knuckles with little resistance and dropped softly into the pile of corn husks at Jaeyong's feet.

He didn't know how it had happened, but it had happened, and the guard moved on without noticing the lightness of his wrist. When work ended at sundown, Jaeyong dug through the husks and slipped the watch into his shoe. There it stayed, his secret, as he ate his evening ration of corn and lay down to sleep in the straw. A watch, even a not-especially-nice watch, could have bought him and his whole family medicine or warmer clothes or extra rations in the camp barter system. But he didn't want to trade it away. He just wanted to feel it there in his shoe, next to his skin.

The next day, Yiha ate her breakfast and half of Umma's and still wanted more. She sat among the corn husks whimpering, saying over and over, "I'm hungry. Jaeyong, I'm hungry."

"Shut up," Jaeyong hissed at her. "I don't have any food for you."

"But––"

She swallowed her complaints in a hurry when the guard from the day before came storming into the building, his face red and twisted. "Where is it?" he barked at the line of children on their stools. "I had my watch here yesterday, I know one of you little rats stole it. Give him up or you'll all be hanging by your toes!"

Jaeyong knew he should have been afraid; judging by the sudden stink of urine in the room, the other children were. He wasn't, though. _Little rat,_ the guard had called him, and he was barely bigger than one, but somehow the guard was the one who seemed small. _Someday,_ Jaeyong thought, _I will be very important, and very powerful, and people will be much more afraid of me than they'll ever be of you._ The thought came to him out of nowhere, and it tasted like dumplings and sweet rice cakes and all the delicious things he could remember with his tongue but not his head. It felt _right._

The guard had gone up the line searching each of them, tearing off their clothes and shoes, picking them up and shaking them. Now he was standing over Jaeyong. "Did you take my watch?" he demanded.

Jaeyong held his eyes. With the tiniest twitch of one finger, he made the watch slither out of his shoe, through the carpet of cornhusks, and into Yiha's lap. "I didn't," he said, smiling at the guard, "but have you asked my sister?"

That was the last time he ever had to hear Yiha's whimpering.


End file.
